This bed is our boat. Beyond it lies an infested ocean.
Sharks, piranhas and electrical eels lap at our sides. And unnameable sea monsters, all teeth and hunger.
There is no mast, there is no sail. No wind to tilt our course. The tiller is broken and the rudder is in shards. All is shattered, lost amongst the waves, as we are.
If fish could growl the sound would fill the air, would make our bones vibrate, and our breath too scared to leave our lungs, hiding safe in our throats, parched and sandy. But all we can hear is the piecing cries of the seagulls, clear and bright and deafening in their punishment.
Rescue might not come. It might never come

This bed is our boat and leaving it would mean death.
I roll around and peer over the edge. They are still here. They are waiting.
I roll back.
The light is gentle and cold, like only winter light in the morning can be. It sets everything on edge, short shadows and sharps angles, and softness all at once. It smells of ice and memories, piercing your mind before you can catch them and wrap them in gauze. Leaving imprints behind your eyes, like bursting stars.
I am awake. So so awake.
The sun is forcing us to catch up with the relentless day. Its movements, the waves, the flutter of the birds, and the swimming fish, all is motion, all is forcing us to move with it, angry at our willingness to float, our desire to remain.

This bed is our boat and there is no shore, no safe haven. There is only an infinity of days that stretches around us and will us to jump. To dive. To swim and die.
There might not be any other way.
We might have to jump.
We might have to loose our flesh to the hungry bites of the ocean.
Our white bones gleaming in the sunlight, gleaming white between sea foam under an unforgiving sky, then sinking, swallowed by the great belly of the world.
They will gnaw, gnaw on them.

We are stranded in a world that hates stillness

There is no other way.
We might have to eat each other before the end.

(reworking of a 2008 poem. For Bianca’s writing prompt)